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All articles with 'date and time' Tag

Convert fractional Excel time to hours & minutes [Quick tip]

Published on Aug 19, 2014 in Excel Howtos
Convert fractional Excel time to hours & minutes [Quick tip]

Time for another quick Excel tip.

Lets say the park near your house rents tennis courts by hour. And they charge $10 per hour. At the end of an intense tennis playing week, Linda, the tennis court manager called you up and said you need to pay $78 as rent for that week.

How many hours did you play?

Of course 78/10 = 7.8 hours.

But we all know that 7.8 hours makes no sense.

We also know that 7.8 hours is really 7 hours 48 minutes.

So how to convert 7.8 hrs to 7:48 ?

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Building a simple timer using Excel VBA to track my Rubik’s cube solving speed [case study]

Published on May 13, 2014 in VBA Macros
Building a simple timer using Excel VBA to track my Rubik’s cube solving speed [case study]

Today, lets learn how to make a simple timer app using Excel. First some background…,

Recently, I learned how to solve Rubik’s cube from my nephew. As a budding cuber, I wanted to track my progress. Initially I used the stopwatch in my iPhone. But it wont let me track previous times. So I thought, “Well, I can use Excel for this”.

So I made a small timer app using Excel. Its quite minimalistic. It has a single button. I press it and it tracks the start time (date & time stamp). If I press the button again, it records the duration.

This way, I can see my progress over next few weeks and may be plot the trend.

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Free 2014 Calendar, daily planner templates [download]

Published on Jan 2, 2014 in Learn Excel
Free 2014 Calendar, daily planner templates [download]

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2014 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calender has,

  • One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
  • Daily event planner & tracker
  • 1 Mini calendar
  • Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
  • Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.
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Find last day of any month with this simple trick [formulas]

Published on Nov 21, 2013 in Excel Howtos
Find last day of any month with this simple trick [formulas]

Here is a handy trick to calculate last day of any month.

Assuming y and m contain the year & month for which you want to find the last day’s date, write

=DATE(y, m+1,0)

That is right, you can use ZERO (0) as the day.

When you do this, Excel tells us the last day of previous month.

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42 tips for Excel time travelers

Published on Oct 17, 2013 in Excel Howtos
42 tips for Excel time travelers

Today, let’s travel in time. Pack your photon ray guns, extra underwear, buckle your seat belts and open Excel!

Of course, we are not going to travel in time. (Come to think of it, we are going to travel in time. By the time you finish reading this, you would have traveled a few minutes)

We are going to learn how to travel in time when using Excel. In simple terms, you are going to learn how to move forward or backward in time using Excel formulas.

So are you ready to hit the warp speed? Let’s beam up our Excel time machine.

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Sort by Birthday [Quick tip]

Published on Aug 26, 2013 in Excel Howtos
Sort by Birthday [Quick tip]

Lets say you have a list of employees and their birthdays. Now you want to sort this list, based on their birthday, not age. How would you do it?

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Can you calculate vacation days in a period? [Homework]

Published on Jan 25, 2013 in Excel Challenges
Can you calculate vacation days in a period? [Homework]

Its Friday, that means time for another Excel challenge for you.

Calculate vacation days in a period:

Your mission, if you choose to accept it,

Step 1: Download the hom work problem file.

Step 2: Calculate number of vacations taken in a period. Specifically,

1) How many vacations are taken between start & end dates, assuming complete vacation should be inside the start & end date period?
2) How many vacations are taken such that at least one day of vacation is between start & end dates?
3) How many people took vacations? (if same person took multiple vacations, then count it as 1)

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Designing a dashboard to track Employee vacations [case study]

Published on Jan 24, 2013 in Charts and Graphs, Learn Excel
Designing a dashboard to track Employee vacations [case study]

Employee Vacation Dashboard & Tracker using Excel

HR managers & department heads always ask, “So what is the vacation pattern of our employees? What is our average absent rate?”

Today lets tackle that question and learn how to create a dashboard to monitor employee vacations.

What do HR Managers need? (end user needs)

There are 2 aspects tracking vacations.

1. Data entry for vacations taken by employees
2. Status dashboard to summarize vacation data

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Top 10 Formulas for Aspiring Analysts

Published on Jan 16, 2013 in Learn Excel
Top 10 Formulas for Aspiring Analysts

Few weeks ago, someone asked me “What are the top 10 formulas?” That got me thinking.

While each of us have our own list of favorite, most frequently used formulas, there is no standard list of top 10 formulas for everyone. So, today let me attempt that.

If you want to become a data or business analyst then you must develop good understanding of Excel formulas & become fluent in them.

A good analyst should be familiar with below 10 formulas to begin with.

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Creating an Agenda template in Excel

Published on Jan 4, 2013 in Templates
Creating an Agenda template in Excel

When planning a meeting, an event or activity, we deal with many individual steps (each taking certain amount of time). Today let us understand how to create an agenda template in Excel using simple formulas.

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2013 Calendar – Excel Template [Downloads]

Published on Dec 26, 2012 in Learn Excel
2013 Calendar – Excel Template [Downloads]

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2013 Excel Calendar Template.

This calender has,

  • One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
  • Daily event planner & tracker
  • 1 Mini calendar
  • Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
  • Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.
Continue »

Highlight best week & month in a trend chart [tutorials]

Published on Dec 12, 2012 in Charts and Graphs
Highlight best week & month in a trend chart [tutorials]

When analyzing business data like sales, shop visits or productivity, one of the questions managers always ask is,

What is the best month / week for this data?

To answer this question, we need to make a chart that looks like above. Today, lets learn how to highlight portions of such charts that correspond to best week or best month.

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Write a formula to check if two dates are in same month? [homework]

Published on Nov 2, 2012 in Excel Challenges, Excel Howtos
Write a formula to check if two dates are in same month? [homework]

Its Home work time folks. Sharpen your Excel pencils and get cracking.

Find out if 2 dates are in same month

Lets say you have 2 dates in A1, A2.

Q1. What formula tells us if both of them are in same month?

Both dates must be in same month & year!

Go ahead and post your answer in comments.

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Homework: Can you extract dates from text?

Published on Aug 17, 2012 in Excel Challenges, Excel Howtos
Homework: Can you extract dates from text?

So who is up for a challenge? Can you use only formulas and extract dates buried inside text?

  1. Download this file.
  2. In column C, write a formula such that you can extract the date in column B
  3. If you succeed, post your solution here as a comment.
  4. If you fail, drink some coffee, start afresh.
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Use MAX to find latest date in a list [Quick tip]

Published on Jun 14, 2012 in Excel Howtos

Here is a quick tip that I learned while conducting training classes in Australia. If you have several dates in a range and you want to find out what the latest date is, just use MAX, like: =MAX(A1:A10) would give you the latest date. A Question…, Assuming you have some dates (not necessarily sorted) in […]

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